Towards a creative geopolitics
Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual Conference, London, 27-29 August 2014.
Session conveners: Dr. Alasdair Pinkerton, Dr. Harriet Hawkins and Prof. Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)
(Sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group)
Creativity has emerged as a key concept across a range of scholarly disciplines, including Geography. Registering the political and economic imperatives of creativity, and its social, material and embodied dimensions, geographers are coming to attend to diverse forms of creative practice and its manifold possibilities, as well as its potential manipulations. Longstanding geographical attention to the creative economy, or to the analysis of various art forms, from fine art to cinema and literature, as well as attention to sub-cultural or subversive creativities, geographical scholarship is increasingly come to engage with vernacular (everyday) creativities, the democratic possibilities of creative use of Web 2.0, and even in-human creativities.
In this session we seek papers that build on these critical geographies of creativity, and in doing so extend cultural perspectives on critical geopolitics and security. Geopolitics has, under its own cultural, embodied and affective turns, seen a recent growth in studies not only of art-work, but also video games, comic books, films. In light of these recent studies we invite papers that revisit questions not only of what such analysis of cultural products do in terms of the critical geopolitical scholarship and practice, but also to query the growth of vernacular creativities, or what could, after creative economic policy, be termed the ‘creativity’ script within statecraft. Furthermore, if creativity could be seen as a form of response to those very scripts, narratives and practices, to what extent might creativity claim new ground in geopolitical analysis and critique, through, for example, the production and co-production of geopolitical materials; the curation of artistic and technological responses; counter-cartographic practices of uncloaking, revealing, improvisation, exploration and play (including, for example, web-based initiatives such as ‘mash ups’); alternative forms of writing and presentation through the counter-factual, scenarios, lyricism, biography and even fiction?
Abstracts of no more that 250 words should be emailed to Alasdair Pinkerton ([log in to unmask]) and Harriet Hawkins ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 7 February 2014. We hope that the sessions will lead to a special journal issue. Please indicate in your email if you would like to participate in this.
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